The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The new Lysenkoism

Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin. He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics. As a result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern genetics.

Under Lysenko’s view, for example, grafting branches of one plant species onto another could create new plant hybrids that would be perpetuated by the descendants of the grafted plant. Or modifications made to seeds would be inherited by later generations stemming from that seed. Or that plucking all the leaves off of a plant would cause descendants of the plant to be leafless.

Lysenkoism was “politically correct” (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with certain broader Marxist doctrines. Marxists wanted to believe that heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics changed by living under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations of humans. Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man.

Also Lysenko himself arose from a peasant background and developed his theories from practical applications rather than controlled scientific experiments. This fit the Marxist propaganda of the time holding that brilliant industrial innovations would arise from the working classes through practical applications. Lysenko’s theories also seemed to address in a quick and timely manner the widespread Soviet famines of the time arising from the forced collectivization of agriculture, rather than the much slower changes from scientific experimentation and genetic heredity.

Lysenko was consequently embraced and lionized by the Soviet media propaganda machine. Scientists who promoted Lysenkoism with faked data and destroyed counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award. Lysenko and his followers and media acolytes responded to critics by impugning their motives, and denouncing them as bourgeois fascists resisting the advance of the new modern Marxism.

The V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced on August 7, 1948 that thenceforth Lysenkoism would be taught as the only correct theory. All Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenkoism. Ultimately, Soviet geneticists resisting Lysenkoism were imprisoned and even executed. Lysenkoism was abandoned for the correct modern science of Mendelian genetics only as late as 1964.

The Theory of Man Caused Catastrophic Global Warming

This same practice of Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming. That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly increased government powers and control over the private economy. Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries. Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.

Those who promote the theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award. Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory. Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?

Those in positions of scientific authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money, publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.

The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is supposed to represent the best science of the U.S. government on the issue of global warming. In January, the USGCRP released the draft of its Third National Climate Assessment Report. The first duty of the government scientists at the USGCRP is to produce a complete picture of the science of the issue of global warming, which is what the taxpayers are paying them for. But it didn’t take long for the Cato Institute to do the job of the USGCRP with a devastating line by line rebuttal, The Missing Science from the Draft National Assessment on Climate Change, Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2012, by Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert C. Balling, Mary J. Hutzler & Craig D. Idso.

Check it out for yourself if you dare. Both publications are written to be accessible by intelligent laymen. See which one involves climate science and which one involves political science.

All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution. The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.

Again, check it out for yourself. You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.

The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well. They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times. They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming. There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists. They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.

Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions. They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists. Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science. The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.

Indeed, 31,487 U.S. scientists (including 9,000 Ph.Ds) with degrees in atmospheric Earth sciences, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science have signed a statement that reads: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” See here. Some consensus.

Real science, of course, is not a matter of “consensus,” but of reason, with skepticism at its core.

The alarmist claims of the UN’s IPCC are ultimately based not on scientific observations, but on unvalidated climate models and their projections of future global temperatures on assumptions of continued increases in carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning and use of fossil fuels. The alarmists are increasingly in panic because the past projections of the models are increasingly divergent from the accumulating actual temperature records. Those models are not real science, but made up science. And no way we are abandoning the industrial revolution as the Sierra Club is hoping based on model fantasies and fairy tales.

The Economist magazine, formerly in lockstep with the Lysenkoists, shocked them with a skeptical article in March that began with this lede:

“OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade. . . .’”

Reality is not complying with the alarmism of the UN’s global warming models, just as it refused to do for Trofim Lysenko. Remember all that hysteria about melting polar ice caps and the disappearing ice floes for the cute polar bears? As of the end of March, the Antarctic ice cap was nearly one fourth larger than the average for the last 30 years. The Arctic ice cap had grown back to within 3% of its 30 year average. (The formerly declining Arctic ice was due to cyclically warm ocean currents). Global sea ice was greater than in March, 1980, more than 30 years ago, and also above the average since then.

Remember the alarm about the rising sea level? Yeah, that has been rising, as it has been since the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago. Just exactly as it has been, at the same rate. And anyone you know that has been scared by this alarmist propaganda has been successfully played by whatever media the fool has been relying on.

Murderous recent winters in Europe are killing as well belief in alarmist global warming on the continent. University of Oklahoma Professor and geophysicist David Deming reported in a recent column,

“The United Kingdom had the coldest March weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in 134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles to clear snow from the streets.”

In the Northern Hemisphere, Deming adds, “Snow cover last December was the greatest since satellite monitoring began in 1966.” That reflects similarly bitter cold winters in North America as well. Despite claims by global warming Lysenkoists that soon children “won’t know what snow is,” on February 6, 2010, a blizzard covered the northeastern U.S. with 20 to 35 inches of snow. Three days later another 10 to 20 inches were added.

The historical proxy record shows CO2 concentrations in the distant history of the earth much, much greater than today. Yet life survived, and flourished. Moreover, the basic science of global warming is that the temperature increasing effect of increased CO2 concentrations declines as those concentrations increase. So stop worrying and enjoy the agricultural abundance in your grocery store.

A tip off regarding reality should have been apparent from the dodgy propaganda involved in changing the labeling of the problem from “global warming” to “climate change.” Of course, Earth has been experiencing climate change since the first sunrise on the planet. We are not going to abandon the workers’ paradise of capitalism because climate change will continue.

Another tip off should have been the effective admission by global warming alarmists that they cannot defend their position in public debate. The day the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming died can be dated from the time that one leading alarmist was foolish enough to debate James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, a video of which can be found on the Heartland website at Heartland.org.

Still another tip off should have been the practice of the alarmist new Lysenkoists to respond to dissenting science with ad hominem attacks. That apparently reflects poor public schooling that never taught that an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy, as Aristotle taught more than 2,000 years ago. My how western science has fallen.

The basic science shows that global temperatures are just not very sensitive to CO2 itself. Even alarmists will concede that. Where they get their alarm is with the modeling assumption that the CO2 induced temperature increases will produce positive feedbacks that will sharply increase the overall resulting warming. The better recent science indicates, however, that instead of positive feedbacks, the naturally stable Earth would enjoy negative feedbacks restoring long term equilibrium and stability to global temperatures.

Then there is the man caused, global warming, fingerprint that the U.N.’s models all showed would result in a hot spot of particularly large temperature increases in the upper troposphere above the tropics. But the incorruptible, satellite monitored, atmospheric temperature record shows no hot spot. That is further confirmed by modern weather balloons measuring atmospheric temperatures above the tropics. No hotspot. No fingerprint. No catastrophic, man caused global warming. QED.

The revival of western science requires that the new Lysenkoism be discredited. That is going to require quite some work, given the extent of the infestation.

"Don't just do something: stand there!" Ronald Reagan was fond of telling overactive functionaries. The same rules apply to the climate change industry: trillions of dollars squandered, vast forces mobilised, public anxieties worked up to fever pitch – all to no useful purpose whatsoever.

That's why – belatedly: there really isn't much time left – I'm urging you to support this hugely worthwhile new film project being organised by Lord Monckton. The aim of the 50 to 1 project is to raise enough money to collate a series of interviews with the likes of Jo Nova, Anthony Watts, David Evans, Fred Singer and Vaclav Klaus, which will then be edited into a short, punchy film. It will demonstrate that no matter where you stand on the "science" of climate change the measures currently being used to deal with the "problem" are hugely expensive and counterproductive.

Even if the IPCC is right, and even if climate change IS happening and it IS caused by man, we are STILL better off adapting to it as it happens than we are trying to 'stop' it. 'Action' is 50 times more expensive than 'adaptation', and that's a conclusion which is derived directly from the IPCC's own predictions and formulae!

There's so much rubbish out there on the internet produced by lavishly funded Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF activists, junk scientists, rent-seeking corporatists and EU- and UN-funded environmental bodies.

Time we hit back with the thing these eco-loons hate most: cold hard facts.

It is true most climate scientists would agree that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use could affect global climate. The basic physics is there to support this view. But there is no evidence that the putative change would be large or damaging. Output from computer models is not evidence unless model performance has been validated. So far, it has not.

The so-called evidence of minor human-caused climatic change can also be attributed to causes or processes other than those related to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

What is rarely mentioned by climate alarmists is the incontrovertible fact that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has an ever-decreasing effect on global temperature. To illustrate this, compare covering a glass window with very thin paint. The first coat of paint cuts out some light, the second some more; but each subsequent coat has an ever decreasing effect on light shining through.

It is true, the warming effect of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations never reaches zero (saturation); but, for significant global warming to occur, increased concentrations must set in motion positive (or destabilising) feedback processes.

Such processes would cause temperatures to rise by some other mechanism. One such mechanism is increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures leading to rising water vapour concentration, which is by far the most important greenhouse gas. This would increase retention of energy from the Sun and lead to further warming, and so on.

To date, scientific evidence suggests that negative (stabilising) feedback processes prevail; possibly due to the cooling effect of increased cloudiness from water vapour increase. If true, this means it is unlikely higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will greatly influence global climate.

Negative feedback processes are played down by climate alarmists who assume climate is governed by positive feedback processes which they claim will lead to runaway global warming. Four billion years of global climate history shows that negative feedbacks prevail.

Climate warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. The evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused warming and natural warming. This has not been done.

Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. Much of the talk of "increasing evidence for global warming" is actually evidence of climate variability.

Whatever the cause of the current warm phase, its occurrence is not unprecedented. Global warming happened from 1850 to 1940, then cooling to 1979. During the Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1200AD, the Vikings sailed in arctic waters that are now covered with sea ice, and farmed Greenland soil that is now too cold for agriculture.

From the results of research to date, it appears the influence of increasing carbon dioxide on global warming is almost indiscernible. Future warming could occur, but there is no evidence to suggest it will amount to much.

Dan Brown’s just-published pot-boiler, “Inferno,” assumes that because the world’s population has doubled over the past half-century its recent exponential increase will continue until the very survival of humanity is at risk.

Like everything else Brown over-writes, this is fiction. Fashionable, but fiction.

His hero, a tiresomely inept professor of symbology, galumphs through the tourist guidebooks of Florence, Venice and Istanbul unsuccessfully trying to halt the release of a mutant virus designed by a suicidal mad scientist to Save The Planet by rendering a third of humanity infertile.

That’s it. Save yourself the monstrous price of this trashy book and buy an ounce of silver instead.

Let us knock the “population explosion” myth on the head. The totalitarian types are as wrong about the supposed danger of too many children as they were about global warming, breathing other people’s tobacco smoke, eating too much salt, or catching bird flu.

There has been no global warming for two decades; the risk of lung cancer from passive smoking is statistically indistinguishable from that of breathing fresh air; if you eat too much salt the body excretes it harmlessly through the kidneys; and bird flu is for the birds.

This is the Age of Scares. To the racketeering governing class, Scares are profitable. One can spot a Scare by three nannying catch-phrases: the lazy “scientists say,” the propagandizing “raise awareness” and the bossy “we must.”

When the three catch-phrases are combined – “scientists raising awareness of [insert Scare du jour] say we must [end freedom and spend trillions on more taxes and still more regulations]” – that is the moment to hold your pocket-book tightly and run for cover.

Little more than a decade ago, awareness-raising scientists used to say there would be 16 billion people on Earth by 2050, compared with 7 billion today. The U.N. even celebrated the millennium by building a World Population Clock to raise awareness of how much scientists said we must spend.

Shortly before midnight on the last day of the old millennium, the World Population Clock broke down – as well it might. For scientists now say global population will peak not at the 16 billion to which that silliest of propaganda gadgets pointed, but at just 9-10 billion by 2050. It will plummet thereafter.

Not that you will find the startling fact of this drastic downward revision mentioned anywhere in Brown’s oeuvre. He was very careful not to raise awareness of it.

What did the mad scientists and the profiteering U.N. get wrong? They failed to study the real-world demographic statistics going back 150 years. Population figures from all nations reveal one crucial but very seldom stated fact.

The richer you are, the slower you breed.

In the world’s most prosperous nations, such as the United States, the indigenous population is declining. Only net immigration and breeding by recent immigrants is keeping the population trend up. In the Third World, by contrast, populations tend to double every 25 years.

It is now established beyond reasonable doubt that the only reliable way to stabilize the world’s population is to lift the standard of living of everyone on Earth above the poverty line.

Even India, whose program of enforced sterilization failed two generations back, and China, whose cruel one-child policy has likewise failed today, have now come to realize that freedom from poverty is also freedom from over-population.

Despite the malevolent efforts of power-mad totalitarians, mad environmentalists and authors of pot-boilers everywhere, the world’s population is getting richer. As we get richer, we have fewer children.

The reasons why richer populations have fewer children than poorer are well understood. They have little or nothing to do with profitable boondoggles such as “women’s education” or the widespread availability of abortifacient contraception.

Consider a village without electricity. Now add electricity. Suddenly, there are other things to do at nighttime than breed.

Consider a subsistence farmer. If he has many children, they will provide for him in his old age. Now add modern agricultural methods. Suddenly, he can make enough to provide for himself in his old age.

Consider Africa, the most infection-prone continent on Earth. Now add proper medical treatment. Suddenly, the pressure to over-breed to ensure racial survival vanishes.

In one respect, and in one respect only, over-population remains a dangerous possibility. If the crazed environmentalists succeed in their demands that the poor should not be lifted out of poverty, and that the rich nations should once again descend into the poverty from which they have lifted themselves, then the world’s population will continue to grow.

Brown’s dismal, half-baked thesis is that the Black Death, the rat-borne plague that killed a third of Europe’s population in the early Middle Ages, led directly to the Renaissance by making the survivors richer.

Yet the Renaissance happened despite the plague, not because of it. It happened because in Italy, and eventually throughout Europe, the governing class came to value the use of reason and learning.

Today, the world’s governing elites are less well educated – and accordingly more prejudiced – than at any time since the Renaissance. It is precisely because they know so little of what is true that they believe so much that is false.

Scientists say we must raise awareness that our leaders’ belief that over-population is a problem arises not because it is a problem but because those in power are as fashionably, profitably ignorant as Dan Brown.

Revealed: The EU's great green U-turn on policy that is sending energy bills soaring across the continent

The European Union is quietly taking steps to shred the ‘green agenda’ responsible for rocketing energy bills across the continent.

It is now urging members to restore Europe’s competitiveness by ‘fracking’ for cheap natural gas from shale, instead of pushing ‘renewable’ energy subsidies which cost consumers billions of pounds.

The policy shift was unveiled last week at a Brussels summit attended by David Cameron.

It comes as MPs prepare to debate the final stages of the Energy Bill when Parliament returns after its Whitsun recess.

In its current form, the Bill will see subsidies for windfarms and solar panels triple to £7.6 billion a year – thus increasing the cost of ‘green’ levies and taxes which already add £100 a year to the average household fuel bill.

But Tory MP Tim Yeo, who was paid a total of £245,000 in the last two financial years by green energy and transport companies, has moved an amendment which would increase this burden still further.

It would force the UK to set a binding target of cutting the carbon dioxide emitted by generating electricity by 90 per cent by 2030 – a goal many experts regard as impossible. But Labour and at least 16 Tories and Liberal Democrats have pledged to support it, and it may well become law.

The EU’s about-turn has been prompted by news that electricity prices in Europe have risen by 40 per cent since 2005, while those in the US have fallen by 10 per cent.

The main reason for America’s cheap energy is its booming shale gas industry.

Many EU nations – including Britain – have their own vast reserves of shale gas, but fierce opposition from green activists has stalled efforts to extract it.

But after last week’s summit, EU leaders issued a statement saying ‘the supply of affordable and sustainable energy to our economies is crucial’.

They added that the EU would support ‘systematic recourse to on-shore and off-shore indigenous resources’ – a reference to shale.

Brussels observers say the summit reflected a shift away from policies aimed primarily at cutting emissions, and towards a drive for cheaper energy.

German MEP Holger Krahmer said: ‘The EU is starting to realise we achieve very little by setting targets for ourselves when the rest of the world won’t, while rising bills are plunging families into poverty.’

Ironically, Energy Secretary Ed Davey will tomorrow urge his European counterparts to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2030.

Surprisingly, this article is written by a researcher at The Energy and Resources Institute, TERI, which is the body led by the IPCC chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. Land availability is a big issue in India

Shilpi Kapur Bakshi

India is blessed with a variety of these clean renewable energy alternatives – biomass, solar energy, wind energy and hydro power. This has encouraged the Government of India to set ambitious targets for renewable energy.

However, India’s interest and efforts in promoting renewable energy may soon create newer sustainability concerns. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy appears to have overlooked the growing conflict between renewable energy and land.

Scarce resource

Land is an already scarce resource in India, with demand from farmers to industrial houses to service institutions and the Government. To this list another claimant has been added; many forms of green energy, especially solar, wind and biomass, rely on huge tracts of land in order to be viable. Setting up renewable energy plants can lead to both direct land transformation that comes with the setting up of the project, and land degradation created by pollutants from fuel and material cycles associated with running these plants.

The increased demand of land is met in many cases through the diversion of land from agriculture and the forestry sector. Indian farmers engulfed in poverty are forced to engage in distress sales or those who have been short-sighted have made it easy for private companies to acquire agricultural land for setting up renewable energy projects. The support extended by Government has also been a common cause.

In Himachal Pradesh, for instance, the hillside forests have been bearing the brunt of the desire to increase the potential of renewable energy.

In the last three decades, more than 6,000 hectares of forests have been destroyed for hydro power projects or for laying power transmission lines.

Land diversion

To put all this in perspective, for solar energy alone, India’s ambitious target is to produce 20GW of power by 2022. The aim was not just to provide an alternate renewable energy option but also to utilise large tracts of wasteland in hot sunny areas.

However, some of JNSM’s initial projects have shown that State governments have helped private companies acquire productive agriculture land to set up solar thermal and photovoltaic units. The dedication of land area near substations for solar cell installations might edge out other necessities that require land.

For example, the generation of electricity from photovoltaic solar panels or the solar tower requires vast amounts of land, and these panels must be built in specific regions in order to achieve maximum efficiency. Typically, a coal power plant requires 2023 sq. m of land per MW for plant installation, whereas the land area required per MW of installed solar power is around 20,234 sq. m.

Most of the wasteland, which could have been utilised to set up solar energy plants, is not connected with roads, and providing connectivity means huge infrastructure costs which inhibit companies from setting up plants there.

In context of bioenergy, the National Biofuel Policy in India has set an indicative target of 20 per cent ethanol and biodiesel in transportation fuel by 2017. The Planning Commission’s ‘Vision 2020’ report called for the plantation of non-edible oil-yielding plants in large areas of waste and degraded land.

Although the Government says no agricultural land or food crops will be diverted for production of biofuel, businesses often target productive farmland.

Instances of farmland, particularly that belonging to small farmers, being diverted for production of biofuel crops like jatropha are not uncommon. This and the possibility of increasing the use of oilseeds and other foodgrains for biofuel, could impact other goals like food security as productive tracts move away from foodgrains production to biofuel generation.

Policy required

For these reasons, there should be clearly defined policy and mandatory usage of Geographical Information System (GIS) for land use, land cover analysis and identification of wasteland for projects while mapping the renewable energy potential over different regions. The Government could also take into consideration renewable energy resource availability as well as land and water uses. This could further be integrated with other concerns on land acquisition.

As more land per square metre is required for every watt of solar and wind energy produced compared to fossil fuel energy, a policy mandating the dual use of land for such projects should be studied.

Indian Government agencies could draw from their own experiences and those of various other nations that have gone through these stages in their quest for non-fossil fuel-based energy.

At the same time, it is essential to prevent the misuse of the Urgency Clause in the Land Acquisition Act, restricting its application to exceptional cases.

The setting up of an independent and representative regulatory authority at the State level to ensure strict compliance of land use norms could be explored. Regulation could also be used not only to mitigate negative impacts and maximise opportunities, but also to strengthen property rights and greater community consultation.

Economic instruments like a tax on land being bought or claimed for renewable energy, similar to a carbon tax, could be applied. This tax could be calculated on the basis of loss of biodiversity, and possibly other factors, and would create an economic disincentive for increased land use.

Although this might have the effect of severely limiting the expansion of some forms of renewable energy such as biomass, it would also force companies to focus their efforts on discovering more land-friendly forms of biomass energy.

Subsidies on purchase of wasteland for setting up renewable energy plants may further incentivise the use of wastelands and lessen the diversion of land from agriculture and forestry.

No coal is all very well, but solar power should not take up productive land.

Preserving the graphics: Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here and here

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Background

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded in the graph above: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is
maximum 4%.

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here .....